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Android Also Comes With a Kill-Switch
Aviran writes "The search giant is retaining the right to delete applications from Android handsets on a whim.
Unlike Apple, the company has made no attempt to hide its intentions, and includes the details in the Android Market terms and conditions, as spotted by Computer World: 'Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement... in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion.'"
and here I was looking forward to this phone for the reason I would be able to add whatever apps I wanted. Google please do not become apple.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
If someone really wants to produce a fully open, Four Freedoms-safe, Stallman-friendly cellphone, they'll have to set up a fully open, Four Freedoms-safe, Stallman-friendly network to run it on. Which probably means someone kindly donating a few squillion for the infrastructure.
The internet got close to that by starting off below the radar. The comms companies will not let that happen again.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
If HTC (or any hardware manufacturer) let you install completely bespoke firmware images on your phone, then they'd have no control over what code you ran on the phone. You could accidentally or intentionally create firmware images which crashed or disrupted the phone networks they were connected to. The network operators would then be very quick to block all Android phones and the handset makers wouldn't be able to sell them anymore - Androids name would turn to mud. I'm pretty sure the firmware images have to be signed by the hardware manufacturer or all hell would break loose.
Security rule #1: don't trust the client.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
There's a reason the baseband firmware and the application firmware (Android) tend to run on seperate CPUs with seperate RAM and flash storage. These then connect to the system via a serial or USB link.
There's no real good reason to not let users update their own user space firmware with whatever they want other than the simple reasons of DRM and user-control.